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Russian Government Decides Against Recreating Museum Shut by Stalin

By Sophia Kishkovsky July 19, 2013 11:23 amJuly 19, 2013 11:23 am

MOSCOW — The Russian government has decided against reuniting two prerevolutionary art collections that include works by Picasso and Matisse. The decision sets to rest, for now at least, a dispute that was addressed directly to President Vladimir V. Putin on live national television and prompted a monthslong war of words between the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

The collections of Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, wealthy merchants who were early patrons of European modernist masters, were nationalized after the Bolshevik Revolution and turned into the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow, which was shut down by Stalin in 1948 as ideologically suspect.

Vladimir Tolstoy, the great-great grandson of Leo Tolstoy and a cultural affairs adviser to Mr. Putin, conveyed the decision in a letter that was posted quietly on the Hermitage’s Web site last week. He wrote that the government had determined, after convening experts, that reviving the museum was “inadvisable” and would pose a threat to the “preservation and integrity” of Russia’s museum collections and could “destroy the historically formed collections” of the Hermitage and Pushkin museums, which hold dozens of paintings from the collections.

In another letter posted on the site, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the general director of the Hermitage, thanked those who he said had saved the museum “from an attempt to ravage it” and said the works from the Shchukin and Morozov collections would soon be moved to halls in honor of the collectors in the newly restored eastern wing of the general staff building of the Hermitage. They are currently displayed in crowded quarters in the main Winter Palace building.

Russia’s museums have been created and destroyed by the whims of rulers over the centuries. Irina Antonova, 91, who was director of the Pushkin museum for 52 years, took her dream of restoring the Museum of New Western Art to Mr. Putin during his live television call-in show in April. Many in Russia’s museum world have connected her sudden retirement, announced by Vladimir Medinsky, the culture minister, earlier this month, to fallout from the dispute and the Kremlin’s scramble to resolve it.

Ms. Antonova, who now holds the newly created post of president of the Pushkin museum — a title that she insists is not merely honorary — after being replaced by Marina Loshak, a prominent and much younger Moscow curator, said in a television interview last week after Mr. Tolstoy’s letter was published that she did not think she had lost the battle.

“I believe that in the end common sense must triumph,” she told Dozhd, or TV Rain, a Moscow television channel, and “we will have a state that will understand what it is to have the kind of museum that we don’t have in Moscow, a top museum of world art in the capital.”

Mr. Piotrovsky told Kommersant, a Moscow newspaper, in an interview published this week that it’s too early to declare victory. Grounds remain, he said, “to fear further attempts to take something from the Hermitage.”